Pope’s message - A church in denial is doomed

COMING, as it does, just weeks after former priest and voracious paedophile and serial liar Tony Walsh was sentenced to 123 years in jail for the most appalling abuses, and as the publication of the report into how claims of child sexual abuse were dealt with in the Diocese of Cloyne is anticipated, the Pope’s Christmas message seems limp, wrong-headed and uninspiring.

Pope Benedict suggested that the Catholic Church has to find what is wrong with its message and with Christian life in general following the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests. He said the church must better train priests so that abusers are not ordained and must work out how to help victims of paedophile priests heal.

At this stage it is probably foolish to expect churchmen of Benedict’s generation to see their role in the brutish scandals as so many people, many of them disappointed and lapsed Catholics, see it. It is probably unwise to expect a church so committed to self-preservation, to guarding its power, pomp and haute couture culture of grandeur, to see itself as it is seen.

It may be even too much to expect an organisation that contemptuously shrugged off enquiries from the Murphy Commission to care how it is perceived outside the Vatican’s corridors of secrecy and power.

How disheartening it is at this point in the tragedy to hear that official Catholicism is wondering what is wrong with its message and with Christian life in general in the context of the abuse scandals. The basic tenets of Catholicism and most of Christianity are as beautiful, as empowering and as life-forming as ever. It is the practice of those who believe themselves entrusted with the administration of those simple, sublime and magnificent ideas of goodness, truth and love that is at issue.

It is increasingly difficult, many have found it impossible, to listen to Vatican Catholicism speak of love and charity, of compassion and honesty when its behaviour in its most recent hour of great challenge has been characterised by deceit, collusion, dishonesty and a determination to preserve the image and power of the institution no matter how many innocent lives are destroyed in the process.

The polarisation caused by this means that those who support the Catholic church’s official position are happy to circle the wagons and comfort each other with the authenticity of their position.

Those who can no longer associate themselves with the protectors of Walsh and his fellow predators cut the link to celebrate the core beliefs of their faith. They leave because they still believe in goodness and hope but not in the institution that has dominated religious practice in this country for generations.

The Church insists it is in a learning process but others have learnt too. They, in ever-growing numbers, have learnt that they can celebrate the beauty of their faith without compromising its message by accepting the writ of those who sheltered the savage paedophiles.

Next weekend very many of us will celebrate one of the two high points in the Christian year but very many of our Catholic churches will echo to the sound of emptiness as they do so. Churchmen of a certain mind-set will blame commercialism, secularism and maybe even an anti-clerical media. As they must know, everyone else does, that truth is far less complicated.